Phonon-gst has some fancier debug options available. In addition to PHONON_GST_DEBUG, there is PHONON_GST_GST_DEBUG. Setting it to 8 or so will cause the gstreamer libraries to produce copious quantities of debug output. We're talking thousands of lines of what seems to be useless noise. Roughly 1% of it is useful, but the phonon-gst devs can easily decipher it and drill down to the important bits.

If the input stream isn't coming from a file, it is likely coming in via KIO which pipes it into an abstractmediastream. If pulseaudio isn't used, then replace pulsesink with something of alsasink, osssink, or somesuch.

Recreating the playback stream of some video file can be done as such: